my microcosm

The Book of the Dead: Lives of the Justly Famous and the Undeservedly Obscure

From the team behind The Book of General Ignorance turns conventional biography on its head and shakes out the good stuff; following their Herculean—or is it Sisyphean?—efforts to save the living from ignorance. The two wittiest Johns in the English language turn their attention to the dead.Here, then, is a dictionary of the dead, an encyclopedia of the embalmed. Ludicrous in scope, whimsical in its arrangement, this wildly entertaining tome presents pithy and provocative biographies of the no-longer-living from the famous to the undeservedly and—until now—permanently obscure.